Landscape Urbanism is an emergent field of planning and design in which the dominant forces that influence urban design are landscape features and ecologies as opposed to architectural structures and utilitarian infrastructure.


Whereas contemporary urban planning and design have typically relied on regulations and policy to dictate manifestation, Landscape Urbanism employs a more organic approach. Relying less on rigidity, Landscape Urbanism perceives urban design as a more natural process and journey through time allowing natural forces to dictate the ebb and flow of physical form.

James Corner defines five general themes for Landscape Urbanism¹. They include:

1. Horizontality - a shift from vertical social structures to horizontal organizational alignment.
   
2. Infrastructures - deemphasize traditional urban infrastructures such as roads, utilities, bridges, subways and airports and emphasizes organic growth of infrastructures.
   
3. Forms of Process - organizational structures should emerge more from process rather than pure subjective physical form
   
4. Techniques - given the scale of contemporary projects, practitioners must be agile and adaptable
   
5. Ecology - "...life is bound into dynamic and interrelated processes of codependency.
   

---

History

Historically, many may argue landscape urbanism has been practiced for centuries and cite canonical works such as Frederick Law Olmsted's Emerald Necklace in Boston as an example. In this particular example, Omsted uses the natural processes of the riparian corridor as well as flooding and tide fluxuations as the organizing element for an urban park. Landscape urbanism differs here in that it is a rejection of modernist architecture and planning.
The project that is most often cited as signaling the beginning of a new movement of landscape urbanism is the 1982 design Competition for the Parc de la Villette. The competition asked for an "Urban park for the 21st Century" on an 125 acre site that was formerly a slaughterhouse.  Of the 470 entries from over 70 countries, two notable submissions stood out. The first being Bernard Tschumi's winning entry which, "formulated landscape as the most suitable medium through which to order programmatic and social change over time, especially complex arrangements of urban activities." ²

The second influential submission was the unbuilt runner-up from Office of Metropolitan Architecture and Rem Koolhas which proposed parallel strips of landscape to support an unplanned and constantly shifting program and juxtapose seemingly divergent elements.

---

Practitioners

Practitioners of Landscape Urbanism include:

James Corner

Moshen Mostafavi

Charles Waldheim

Chris Reed

---

Notable Projects:

Parc de la Villette

Downsview Park

Fresh Kills Park

---

See Also:

Landscape Architecture
Urban Design
New Urbanism

---

References:

1. Mohsen Mostafavi et als Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the Mechanical Landscape London, Architectural Association, 2003, P 59-63
2. Waldheim, Charles. (ed) The Landscape Urbanism Reader. 1st ed. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006: P 40-41